Driving Strategic Innovation and Participant-Centered Learning

"I wish I could’ve had done this when I was at Harvard," Prof. Hiroshi Uchikoga begins before pausing and adding, "not that I would want to go back there," to scattered chuckles.

Before breaking for lunch on Day 3 of the Driving Strategic Innovation course, on which participants discussed Professor Robert Langer's laboratory at MIT, participants in the course were offered the chance to facilitate class discussion using predetermined questions.

"I think I would have gotten more out of the participant-centered learning if I had a chance to try it this way," the professor continues, positing that practicing facilitation develops better participation. Having earned an MBA from Harvard Business School while working at Toshiba in 1996 before going on to Softbank as a manager in the investment division and finally founding his own companies based in the US, Professor Uchikoga chose three students to practice fielding and connecting comments, moving the discussion forward by posing new lines of inquiry.

Together, the students explored Langer's leadership and other factors that create a successful research enterprise--one which became the source of an unusually large number of published papers, patents, and technology licenses to start-up and established companies in the biomedical industry.